I presented at the end of the inaugural GameTech conference last week before a panel looking beyond console, revenue streams & individual game formats and looking at games breaking out into real space and becoming 24/7 – my talk was entitled

“Pervasive entertainment – entertainment that is all around you, 24 hours a day, persistent – probably location based – possibly merged with real world – driven by devices that are mobile, always on & location aware?” G Hayes

It was great to see industry heads gathered at the beginning of the conference such as this State of Industry panel twitpic I took featuring the Australasian heads of Ubisoft, EAGames, Sony and Microsoft.

As well as a government endorsement introduction from Brendan O’Connor, the Australian Minister for Home Affairs & Digital Culture who talked briefly about games as portable, ubiquitous & networked – yay! He also talked about the R rating for Australia on the way which is a big relief for games distributors!

But my talk later was a broad brushstrokes whirlwind tour at the exiting period we are entering where the promise of ‘technology based’ pervasive entertainment for the last decade or two is getting very close. Another perfect storm as locative play intersperses with augmented reality, where socially produced media becomes embedded into real time broadcast networks and where game is truly dispersed across multiple platforms.

Here is the basic structure of the prez:

What is Pervasive Entertainment / Gaming

What is Multi Platform / Transmedia in a Gaming Context

Games spilling into the real world Evolution of Experiential AR

Business Models of Pervasive AR Entertainment

Futures and Takeaways

The presentation is embedded below but before I launched into the definitions & case studies I asked the game industry audience –

“Who is the games industry? As all aspects of our lives become ‘gamified’ such as shopping, travel, social life, locations & TV/Film, has the games industry lost the initiative by allowing marketeers, AR & transmedia companies, ad agencies, film & TV producers to create & monetize these new pervasive forms of entertainment?”Gary Hayes – GameTech 2011 Sydney

It was too late in the conference for this to be tackled or even mean anything to those locked into AAA console title production line or part of an incumbent traditional media machine. Earlier in the conference there was a sense that if the game is not commoditized (delivered in a nice box on the shelf of the local games store) then it is outside the industry boundaries and therefore let those companies involved in more distributed, transmedia games fight over the scraps. Full slide show follows

Social media is a humbling experience much of the time. For one it is a super fast barometer of many aspects of our digital persona made up partly of a) our online influence, b) what people ‘feel’ about you (sentiment) and c) who we are connected too but more recently with the introduction of Twitter Lists we now have an element of ‘labelling’ aka ‘tagging’. Like most I am not keen on being pigeon holed, filed and rubber stamped as ‘this kind’ of person or someone who only ‘thinks/creates/is involved’ in those things, but I was fascinated this morning in doing what Laurel Papworth did some months ago, looking at how others saw me based only on my Twitter activity.

I have currently been added to 700 lists (which I think is up in the top 10% or so?) –

the key of course is that these lists are created un-prompted by those they follow, they have selected ‘you’ quietly in the background to be a part of a personal filter, carefully structured by users who want a way to distill the vastness of a 140 character universe of noise, that is twitter – making lists for themselves of a few key personal influencers through to hundreds of sharing tweeters across several lists on quite broad topics, the lists themselves followed by thousands.

There were over 6.5 million twitter lists at the start of 2010 so I suspect at least double that for 2011 according to TNW and there are hundreds of tList directories on the web now such as ListAtlas that focuses on the most popular lists such as 22 000 following the @bieberarmy :: justinfollowplease list of 91 fans who “want to be followed” by JB himself or 38 verified world leaders compiled into this list @verified :: World Leaders followed by 15 000 or so. But back to my own little world…I am not sure if the lists below represent ‘who I am’, especially as 75% of my twitter activity is sharing links, but they certainly represent areas I work in and am interested by.

… without further ado – I quickly used TextWrangler to pull out key words and broke the 700 lists (I am on) into smaller ‘categorised’ batches. This serves as a one stop shop for me to dip in and out and decide which lists I will follow and for you to possibly find ones you may find of interest.

I just captured and uploaded to YouTube a TV show (yes they are still going!) this morning featuring Australia’s leading social network strategist and social network hostess with the mostess, Laurel Papworth – also occasional LAMP mentor and speaker!.

Also featuring Aussie K (who has 102 000 MySpace Friends) they both talk with David and Kim (always playing dumb’ish) on the Channel 10 morning show on Thursday 17 April 2008 about how people can become social network ‘stars’, business orientated ‘netrepeneurs’ making money from niche communities and various techniques in starting out and public and private safeguards. Laurel’s blog post has more info. Here is the show in two seven minute chunks:

2 YOUR BODY AS GAME INTERFACE

I bought a Vuzix VR920 (3D slick glasses) the other day and can now experience World of Warcraft and Second Life amongst hundreds of other virtual worlds in 3D at 1024 resolution. This has an in built 3 axis gyro type control – so as you move your head the view changes naturally – what used to be $10s of thousands is now $350 US and things will get better quicker. But of course to move around and interact with objects you still have to use that clunky mouse and keyboard – so along comes Mitch Kapor of Linden Lab with his cheap and cheerful 3D motion detection camera – and to show how fast things are moving this was a 3 week project! Now we can all stand up and get some exercise while playing our favourite games (in 3D too!!)

More from CNET copied below:

While the Nintendo Wii has garnered attention from consumers and media alike for its innovative motion-based controls, Linden Lab is experimenting with a new way to interact with its Second Life virtual world with nothing more than a Webcam. Codenamed Segalen, the technology makes use of 3D Webcams, such as the ones from 3DVsystems, to track user’s body gestures to let them navigate and edit within the environment.

On Bossut’s blog he notes that the project has only been in “real” development for a little more than three weeks. Second Life users looking to get their hands on it will have to wait, however, the 3D cameras in use for the project are still not readily available to consumers.

Similar efforts to use Webcams for gaming include the XBOX 360 and its Live Vision camera as well as the Playstation’s EyeToy series, although neither had the 3D hardware capability that will give Kapor’s Handsfree 3D its extra dimension of spacial control.

3 DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH FRIENDS TO BE A CYBER CELEBRITY

An interesting insight into the most popular social networkers.

Went to a MySpace developers pre-launch party last night and had nice chats with the Australia MySpace crew and visiting US developer leads (see previous post) who are here to catalyse some really cool ‘widgets’ and apps for a still pretty dominant global Social Network. One thing they gave to us was a really cool top 10 list of celeb status, MySpace users based on the number of friends they have but as well as the stats a psychographic breakdown of these social network stars and an insight into why they are so popular. Without going into lots of detail on the background of these folk for now here is the top ten list, with their myspace.com page, age and how many friends they have!

Rank

Username

MySpace page

Friend count

Gender

State

Age

1

Hanny

hanny

212 727

F

WA

20

2

SophBox

sophie_rox_ur_sox

203 768

F

NSW

16

3

TanyaBitterSweet

bit3_m3_whor3

135 551

F

QLD

4

CrazyChick187

crazychick187

125 789

F

VIC

29

5

Aussie K

miss_tease

101 055

F

VIC

20

6

Rach!

chicksaxplayer

60 846

F

WA

35

7

LunaTix

luna_tix_88

47 186

M

SA

20

8

CHeLsIA

chlesiaroselambet

45 557

F

QLD

35

9

ShaundaPrawn

shaunny

43 802

M

NSW

27

10

Dan (the heartbreak kid)

dansharp89

40 996

M

QLD

19

OK without going into great detail on the above stats either interesting thoughts. That most are female, obviously the better social networkers! The age is actually quite high for the MySpace demographic at around 24 for these top MySpace celebs. Finally given most of us are around the 100-1000 friends across individual networks those figures are actually suggesting that famous long tail shape, the curve with 20% really popular then tailing off to us normal folk – what do you think? Other notable stats about the Oz MySpace phenomenom:

24.5% of Australian internet users uniquely visit MySpace

4.3 million hours spent on MySpace during Jan 08

Three quarters of MySpace users are 18 and above, around 2.1 million adults

Nielsen online now report that half of the whole Australian population have social networking profiles, and in the next year another quarter said they will be signing onto one

Hitwise track social networking sites and MySpace is the most popular with 22.12% with YouTube at 18.25% and Facebook at 12.05%. The suggestion as to its popularity here is that it is linked to cultural interests across music, fashion, comedy, sport and film.

We have seen a lot of videos about the changing media environment but this one nearly a year old, slipped through the net. So just been to a great business, Trans-Tasman lunch and Tony Surtees who was speaking about ‘The Conversation’ played this very cool video which reinforces my previous post. Funny and worrying for traditional advertising models at the same time.

Online ads more effective than TV ads

The block below is from Advanced TV and seems to be another brick in the wall of proof that the ‘two-way-network’ is now starting to reach an ‘advertising’ contender level of maturity as most folk are spending most of their time on the web. It has synergy with other reports from Pew and Nielsen (which we will comment more on soon) of the growing ‘creativity’ and/or sharing exhibited by Generation C’s and Millenials again drawing people away from passive media consumption.

But back on topic, last year in the UK Google showed it already had more ad revenues than one of the leading Commercial broadcasters Channel 4 while also stating that the UK population were spending more time on the web. Also with the trojan horse of DVRs (Personal Digital TV Recorders) renowned for ad skipping, methinks advertising funded broadcasters seriously need to do some R&D into new advertising models – especially as this is a portent for contextual, personalized and targeted advertising. (Oh and for those who haven’t seen it yet I embed EPIC below for the upteenth time).

NBC has released research that suggests advertising in its programmes streamed online are better liked and more recalled than advertising on TV. According to a survey conducted on 5000 users of NBCÃ¢Ã„Ã´s online service Ã¢Ã„Ã²NBC RewindÃ¢Ã„Ã´, viewers said ads streamed online with full-length episodes were less disruptive than on television and that they had a strong desire to interact with advertising. Ads with Interactive elements were more likely to elicit higher brand recall as well as high agreement that the ads were entertaining and relevant. “NBC.comÃ¢Ã„Ã´s loyal users actively navigate and curate their own experience in NBC Rewind, so there is a high level of engagement,” said Peter Naylor, senior VP, digital media sales, NBC Universal. “These research results show that when the right message is tailored to the right medium, this engaged audience really responds and our advertisers win.”

The Richest Mobile Platform Ever?

I have been using my iPhones to do some strange things over the past months. Most of the coolest apps come from the very active community of developers already delivering some great apps via the installer application that runs on unlocked iPhones. I have remarkably run PlayStation 1, Nintendo Entertainment System, SCUMM and Gameboy emulators. I never thought I would be playing with Tomb Raider on a hand held device so soon. So it makes absolute sense that Apple finally makes this official and opens the iPhones doors to developers via its SDK programme this week. Wired has a brief article with some rumours of the likely extension-type applications that will turn the iPhone into ‘the’ most eclectic mobile device on the planet.

Four months of rumors, speculation and giddy anticipation will come to an end Thursday, as Apple prepares to reveal how it will transform one of the most-hyped devices in tech into a full-fledged platform…the SDK will be in programmers’ hands soon, and analysts and developers expect a wide variety of applications to blossom in the coming months – everything from photo-editing apps to motion-sensing games that take advantage of the device’s orientation sensor…While enterprise software may not be as sexy as movie and game apps, its inclusion could be huge for Apple’s ability to meet its goal of 10 million iPhone sales by the end of the year. By adding features like push e-mail and cultivating relationships with corporate-software vendors, Bajarin says, the iPhone could become one of the major communication platforms in business, making it much more competitive with the corporate-friendly BlackBerry.

BTW the image above is from this developer blog – kottke.org thinks the iPhone could run IE on top of Windows via Parallels on iPhones OS X system sitting on Linux core, now my head hurts.